The difficulty is that the pharmaceutical grade Polyphenon-E is no longer available and in most countries, what is actually in green tea supplements is not guaranteed with respect to dosage and contaminants, such as pesticides and heavy metals. Further, most supplements are low in EGCG - the active ingredient and to achieve any worthwhile effect, based on the Mayo Clinic trials, you need to be taking around 4 grams per day of EGCG.

You'll find plenty of previous discussions on green tea/EGCG and I've been taking it for 8 years. (Thankfully Australia regulates supplements to some extent.) Whether it is doing me any good is hard to say; my blood counts are trending closer to needing treatment, but my spleen hasn't enlarged further in that time and my nodes seem to be stable to the extent I can determine without a CT scan.

I also thought Egcg, why not try it? I took one capsule a day for 6 months and then I had a consult with a CLL specialist. While my ALC was slightly higher than in the past he said I was most likely one of the fortunate ones with indolent CLL and that my numbers were stable. Because of his comments and the risk of side effects of the Egcg I quit taking my daily dose. Now 6 months later and my ALC is lower than when I went in to see the specialist. So does that mean "not taking" the Egcg lowered my ALC? Probably not, but this scientific study of one person's experience doesn't suggest it helped either. And obviously I was not taking a high dose so that is probably why too.

Clinical trials may not be perfect, but they are recognised as the best way to determine the effectiveness of what's under trial. Grabbing at straws is quite understandable in desperate situations, but thankfully with CLL, it is rare that there's an urgent need to 'do something'. Some of us do have a strong need to be doing something and thereby giving ourselves some sense of remaining in control, which is why I started taking EGCG. There are quite a few effective strategies we can undertake however, as collected in this three part series:

I've been taking Green tea for EGCG for 8 years. For the last few years I've been taking the tea capsules during the week and turmeric on the weekends. As I said above 'Whether it is doing me any good is hard to say; my blood counts are trending closer to needing treatment, but my spleen hasn't enlarged further in that time and my nodes seem to be stable to the extent I can determine without a CT scan.' So I'd say that the EGCG is not having much effect on my bone marrow infiltration. That's not at all surprising, because even some clinically trial tested drugs have show poor efficacy against CLL cells in the bone marrow, where they are well protected.